Overcoming the Major Challenges Associated With Video Marketing

Video marketing is often considered to be one of the most effective methods of increasing user engagement, but it’s also one of the most challenging. Improperly handled video marketing isn’t just ineffective, it’s also costly and time-consuming. That certainly doesn’t mean it should be avoided, but it does need to be approached with caution and well-researched. For the below reasons — and many more — companies will benefit from hiring a company to handle their video marketing from start to finish.

Quality Control in a Multimedia Environment

To write the perfect article you need to be an experienced writer. To create an excellent infographic you need to be both a conscientious researcher and a talented designer. But to create a video you need an accomplished writer, actor and filmmaker. There are three core components to creating the perfect digital marketing video: script, audio and visual.

Script. Creating the ideal video marketing script is not a skill that every writer has. Scripts need to be punchy, exciting, brief and memorable while still hitting all of the major content points. Scripts need to be extremely well-organized so that the data presented can be retained. Scripts also need to be clever, creative and insightful to draw the viewer in.

Audio. Audio can break down to narration, voice acting or live acting. Regardless, the difference between an amateur and a professional can often be keenly felt. This is an area in which the budget may be tested. The more engaging the voice, the more likely users are to engage.

Visual. Both animation and film can be costly and time-consuming in their own way. Animation takes time to do correctly and it requires a professional artist for it to be done right. Film requires paid actors and directors, the cost of which may be significant. But cutting back on any of these areas may produce a video that is simply not worth watching.

On top of all that, you also need to consider how you will promote your video and how you will craft the perfect call-to-action for conversions. A video budget will need to be realistic about the cost of all of these components and any budget cuts will need to be thoroughly considered beforehand.

Technical Hurdles for DIY Video Marketers

Of course, not everyone has the budget for a professional video marketing team. There are some ways that a DIY marketer can cut corners — mostly on the production side — but it’s going to take quite a bit of effort and it probably won’t yield the best results. This still demands that the digital marketer invest a significant amount of time (and often money) learning the basic tools of the trade. Marketers need to know how to create, compress and distribute their videos.

Creating. Producing a professional video is a non-trivial task, but if all the components are there — fantastic audio and video, a snappy script — most people can create something that is serviceable for their marketing campaign, if not earth shattering. There are quite a few software platforms to choose from, ranging from the remedial to the very advanced.

Compressing. When first created, most video is extremely large — we’re talking gigs of data for just minutes of content. It would take far too long to even transfer to anyone, let alone be easily viewed by hundreds or thousands of potential consumers over the web. Video should be compressed as much as possible without losing quality; today HD are standard.

Distributing. Many businesses use either a content delivery network (CDN) or a video service such as Vimeo or YouTube to distribute their videos. Trying to support the bandwidth for videos on your own server is prohibitively expensive, likely to bog your server down and largely unnecessary.

A properly motivated business owner can probably overcome many of the above issues — but ultimately it becomes a question of whether it’s a valuable use of their time.

Increased Dependence on Social Sharing

It should be obvious that video marketing presents some basic search engine optimization challenges, many of which are shared by infographics. Video content cannot be indexed the same way that text content can. While keywords and tags can be used to bolster search engine visibility, the sheer volume of material available often makes it difficult to differentiate between videos, creating a needle-in-a-haystack scenario and making it difficult to rise to the top in more well-trafficked categories.

Some websites compensate by posting transcripts of their videos alongside the videos themselves, but this doesn’t work as a viable solution when marketers are primarily distributing their videos through platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. For a large part, marketers need to hope that their videos will be interesting and insightful enough to be shared through social media. And this again underscores the critical importance of valuable content.

Video marketing creates an inherently high stakes environment. Crafting a quality video involves many moving parts, and the failure of any one of these parts could lead to the complete failure of the whole. But when done by an expert, video marketing can result in a sizable return on investment. While the temptation may be there to attempt video marketing on one’s own, it’s really a situation in which paying for a professional will reduce cost and frustration overall.